Category Archives: US History

Aging, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

This Shooting

Leave a comment

Winter                              Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

A decent snowfall here last night but not a lot.  The sun shines bright on the old Front Range.  Colder though.

This shooting.  It seems apparent to me that the general atmosphere of current political debate can give permission to some marginal folks to take action.  Reference to Second Amendment remedies leaves little room for the imagination.  So, I wish the tea party folks would tone down their rhetoric.  It seems to me the decent thing to do.

Here, though, I am hoisted on my petard since I will defend the right of even dimbulbs to say what they will and I count the tea party among them.  That same principle though allows me to say what I think of their analysis.

We were radicals once, and young.  The movement of the 60’s had its violent fringe, restricted to bombs, yes, but nonetheless.  I have some sympathy for folks who feel aggrieved and inclined to say the most inflammatory that floats to the surface.  I also have sympathy for those who say their language should not be seen as per se violent.

Still, I look back on those days, the anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-racist days, and remember that we did feel a certain joint responsibility for what others of us did.  We knew we were connected by our analysis and our perceived common enemy.

A common enemy shared, at least in part, with the tea party folks:  the Federal Government.  We thought they over reached with the draft and the war.

Here’s the big lesson from those times that I would pass on to my ideological mirror images.  We were wrong about the government being the enemy.  The government is only what we allow it to be.  The government is the sin-eater for the nation.  It collects the hurts and hopes and problems of us all and attempts to sort them out, improve things when it can.

Do they often get it wrong?  Yes.  Do we in our own lives?  Yes?  Our governmental process is sloppy, takes too long to come to a decision and, like generals, seems bent on fighting the last war rather than the next one.

Still, it is our form of resolving disputes and it is, I agree with Churchill here, the worst form of government save all the rest.

I would hope the tea party folks would back away from defensiveness, difficult, I know, and examine their message to see if it says what they want, check to see if gives succor to those fringe folks who would move beyond the pale of political discourse, no matter how heated, into the realm of violent action.  If they do this, they will gain some admiration for restraint, if  they do not, they risk losing it all.

Friends, Politics, Retirement, US History

Never Ending Terror

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                 Waxing Moon of the Cold Month

The big day has arrived.  Kate’s last shift.  She’s off right now getting her nails done–her constant scrubbing in and out of rooms made fancy nails silly–and her toes, since she wears sandals almost all year round.  This way she’s dolled up for tonight and for the next week in Colorado.

Back a bit I bought a print by a Minnesota artist, Mike Elko.  It hangs to the right of this computer and looking at it right now triggered a major aha.  The print is the faux cover of a magazine, Practical Paranoia.  It features a cartoon woman with sixties hairdo and clothing, a tear trickling down her face and this copy next to her:  He keeps saying, “If you question me, then the terrorists have won!”  Is all of this really necessary or is he just trying to make me crazy?  I live in…

NEVER ENDING  TERROR!

A Bush era piece, I bought it in part as a lest we forget, a cautionary tale about government gone loony.  As I looked at it right now, I realized a huge difference, a huge positive difference between the Bush and the Obama eras.  We don’t feel this way anymore.  There is no longer the Cheney–Rumsfeld–Bolton–Wolfowitz–Kristol nexus, a sort of demented nerve ganglia that twitched and pulsed cries of alarm at every shadow.  Obama has calmed us as a nation while continuing to actively pursue terrorists, and a sober analysis of the Bush methods.

Aging, Memories, Politics, US History, Writing

1967

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                 Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

1967.  Anastasia Pydych, a docent friend, has done a movie on 1968 which has a relevance to her father that I can’t recall right now.  A friend of hers, a writer for Rolling Stone, has a book underway about 1967.

When told her I was a sophomore in college that year, she said, “Oh, that’s perfect.  That would have been the perfect time.”  It reminded me of a comment made by one of the interviewees for the Sierra Club policy position, “I wish it could be like in the 70’s, when people had passion.”

We didn’t know it was historic, that year, we were living it.  It was a confusing, wonderful, chaotic, astonishingly hopeful, colorful, drugfull, penetrating, unafraid time.  Long ago, I don’t recall where now, I read that the 60’s happened because there was so many young adults than mature adults, that we, in effect, socialized ourselves.  That still seems like the most cogent explanation I’ve heard for the extraordinary sense of freedom and possibility that swept through my corner of the world, central Indiana.  As people passed through town, Muncie, and as some of us hitchiked around and saw other campuses in other states, we knew personally that it was not just us.  A crazy, heady wind had begun to blow, and the times, as Dylan said, were obviously changin’.

It was in ’67 when the draft became a big issue, right across the country.  And, yes, there is an obvious class bias involved in draft deferments, since those of us in college could get one and those who weren’t couldn’t.  Yes, again, there were many baby boomers, probably most, whose lives went on as they would have anyhow, taking a factory job, going into the military, learning a trade, trying out different jobs, getting married, settling down and raising kids.

That wasn’t the way it felt at the time, however.  In those years we believed, as I still believe, that US adventurism and a naive anti-Communism had caused us to insert ourselves in a civil war centuries old, a war in which we had no self-interest and chose our allies only because they identified themselves as the anti-communists.   Most of us men in college then, at least those of us on the left, saw the draft as a form of indentured servitude, only with a cruel twist, in this case the slaves had to die or kill.  Not a great choice.  Many of us, like me, were selective objectors, that is we opposed the Vietnam War as a stupid meat-grinder conceived in Washington and held in place by machismo gone wild, but we were not conscientious objectors, that is, we did not object to all wars.

That sense of being at odds with the ultimate power of the land, the Federal Government, was a powerful glue.  It stuck us together.  We were more disparate than unitary in our objections to the draft, but we were at one in our objection to the war.

This sense of overagainstness,  a feeling bordering on outlaw, made us courageous and reckless.  It made the days, the hours, we lived focus on experimentation, on analysis, on argument, on planning, yes, but also on relationships, parties, drugs and acid rock.  If the man didn’t understand us, we’d understand ourselves.  And boy we worked at it.

If you’re going to San Francisco…  I missed the Summer of Love and Woodstock, though I did make it to two hot years of the Cincinnati Jazz Festival.  I wish I could get the words to say how it felt then.  We felt free, even called, to challenge anything and everything:  our parents, their values, college administrations and their ridiculous in loco parentis, the draft boards, day-to-day reality, sexual limits, congress, the President, the military.  All of it, each day, every minute.  The times were so intense, so charged, so electric.

Well, here’s the thing.  Kate has a colonoscopy in the morning and I have to drive her.  I’m drawing Social Security and so is she.  This next week is her last week of full time work.  1967 is a long time ago is what I’m saying.  But, boy am I glad I was part of it.  It was quite a ride.

Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

First Amendment

Leave a comment

Winter                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Walker stands with national peers in support of artistic freedom.  This is a big deal and I’m proud to be part of a community and an artistic/museum community that supports artistic freedom.

54 years ago I began carrying newspapers for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, a paper route that went west on Monroe Street from Harrison, then fanning out toward the then brand new elementary school.  Learning to fold the evening paper, the Trib was a daily back then, in a square, and how to pitch it in a gentle arc that landed on my customers doorsteps gave me physical pleasure, a manual skill.

My dad was editor of the paper then, so the question of freedom of speech was, at least in our house, not a question at all but a loud proclamation, made every day about 3:30 p.m. when the Trib hit the streets courtesy of myself and several other carriers.

(This artist made the banned movie:  David Wojnarowicz   Four Elements  1990 lithograph on paper  T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991)

Dad did a couple of things that stuck with me though I imagine he did many more.  First of all when the John Birch Society raised its impeach Earl Warren/US out of the United Nations flag around town, Dad got a copy of its founder’s book, The Blue Book.  In it Robert Welch outlined clearly anti-democratic, plutocratic views.  Dad published relevant portions in the Tribune.  Gutsy in a town of 5,000.   Later, he also published a letter to the editor by a would be English teacher rankled at Dad’s opposition to this coach becoming a teacher of the language.  He printed the letter as received with many spelling and grammatical errors.  Coach did not get the job.

Extraneous sidebar:  the same coach got himself arrested years later in southern Indiana when he stole a bucket of quarters while gambling on a river boat.

You may know the John Birch Society best in its present day position of influence behind the Tea-Party Mad Hatters.  My hometown was and is a hotspot for extremist right-wingers.  Back in the day it was the John Birch Society and the Minutemen, later the KKK and now the Tea-Party.  In fact, the Alexandria, Indiana leader of the Tea-Party got arrested for drug possession last week.  My old buddy, Ed Schmidt, alerted me to that piece of news.  Ed was mayor of Alexandria for a couple of terms.

Muzzling critics, whether political or artistic, cannot be countenanced in a society built on a free exchange of ideas.  The need to speak truth to power demands that we go out of our way to listen to voices on the margin, to open ourselves to what might be unpleasant messages or messages wrapped in unpleasant containers.  The freedom they’re saving just might be your own.

Art and Culture, Dreams, GeekWorld, Myth and Story, US History

Ol’ John Henry Was A Pile-Drivin’ Man

1 Comment

Samhain                                              Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In the John Henry versus the pile driver, Watson versus Jeopardy competitions I come down on the side of the poor schlubs trying to prove we’re not over with as a species.  It comes as a special insult then when I can’t make a particular machine work.  After all, if the machine doesn’t work, we cannot prove our mastery over it.  Neither can we get anything done.

50%.  That was my results.  I got the snowblower going, coughing and sputtering, blowing blue flame from the air filter, chugging like an emphysemic senior citizen climbing stairs, but, nonetheless, blowing snow.  All the gasping and gurgling came from the year old gas still left in its system.  I siphoned the tank, but there was still gas in the engine itself.  It will, gradually, calm down unless the carburetor has too much varnish on it from the aging gas.

The chainsaw, on the other hand, would not come back to life.  I fed it new gas mixed with the proper amount of oil, filled up its chain lubricant reservoir, pulled out the choke, set the kick-back safety bar and yanked.  And yanked.  And yanked.  Not even a murmur.  At some point in the process I began to make physical fitness resolutions.  Lose 10 pounds.  Do resistance work.  A machine I can use and I can’t get the damn thing started.  So, after much huffing and puffing–me–I decided to let it and me rest for a while.

Now I’m back at a machine that I understand better than the chain saw, though not much better, but one with which I am much more familiar.  This is my 8th or 9th computer, orders of magnitude faster than the others with storage so great that I struggle to fill a third of it and programs that can do wonders.

Palmer Hayden and John Henry

In 1944 he embarked on what became a three-year effort to create his most famous group of paintings, the John Henry series. The idea, however, stemmed from his childhood when he heard his father and others sing the ballad of the “steel drivin’ man” and when he first made sketches of his hero.

His efforts to make the series were helped when his wife found a book titled John Henry: A Folklore Story by Louis W. Chappell which indicated the story of John Henry was based on a real person by that name. Hayden corresponded with Chappell. Chappell, an instructor at West Virginia University, answered Hayden’s questions and, in a letter, urged him to make John Henry’s woman a red head. He said, “I hope she will look like something fit to go home to when the day’s work is over and the night’s work is ready to begin, and such a woman is not altogether a matter of clothes.”

He also stressed the importance of John Henry’s hammer. “I have an idea that Henry’s hammer might well create a number of problems for the painter,” he told him. “I have yet to see a picture of Henry holding his hammer in his hands, or swinging it in driving steel, that has the slightest touch of reality in it.”

Hayden heeded Chappell’s urgings. The Dress She Wore Was Blue depicts a woman with red hair that probably satisfies the request to make Henry’s woman “fit to go home to”, while Hammer in His Hand shows John Henry holding his hammer in a realistic way.

The John Henry series was exhibited at the Argent Gallery in New York City, January 20 to February 1, 1947. A New York Times reviewer said “…the story of John Henry is unfolded in a dozen oils by Palmer Hayden, who has captured something of the combined literalness and imaginative quality in Negro spirituals in these paintings of that ‘steel-drivin’ man from childhood to his fatal competition with a steam drill….The artist has found and utilized illustratively the picturesque material in the saga of the black Paul Bunyan.”

Hale Woodruff wrote in the guest book for the show, “very good, Palmer!”

Hayden later said in an interview that Henry was “a powerful and popular working man who belonged to my section of the country and to my race.” He also related to him because Henry was so much like the men he grew up with. And, in The Seine at St. Cloud, the two symbols of Hayden’s hometown, the railroad and the river, appear in There Lies That Steel Drivin’ Man.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Health, US History, Weather +Climate

The Civil War

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                 Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The NYT has started a series focusing on the civil war, looking back 150 years ago.   Lincoln has just been elected and the country has an internal division not matched again until, perhaps, the 1960’s, the War’s one hundredth anniversary.  The Civil War fascinates me and I’ve visited several battlefields, as I’ve said here before.  I’ve been especially interested in the war’s execution, why did the North win and the South lose?  What have been the subsequent ramifications?  Did Lincoln’s execution, which put Andrew Johnson in the Presidency, set back the integration of African-Americans into American society by a century or more?  What did we learn?  I look forward to a several year focus on the war, raising these questions anew.

A quiet physical.  Saw Tom Byfield there, apparently we share a doctor.  Tom, Davis that is, collects pueblo pottery and has a couple on loan to the MIA.  I didn’t recognize his description, but I’m gonna check’em out.  This time, the first time in a long time, I had no particular concerns to raise.    He found nothing new or remarkable.   The labs will come in, of course, and we’ll see then, but for now, I’m feeling good.

When I drove in today, each exit off Highway 94, starting at Broadway, then 4th street and finally Hennepin/Lyndale had cars backed up onto the freeway.  I took Hennepin/Lyndale thinking there must a traffic jam in the city because of the snow.  Nope.  A peculiar situation, one of those imponderables that happens here when we get lots of snow and very cold weather.  People drive strange.

On the news sheet:  4 bodies in NYC, dumped along a Long Island freeway, might mean a serial killer.  Motorcycle thief steals $1.5 in Bellagio chips, rides away.  So, is it news stories ripped from the television cop dramas or the other way around?

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Myth and Story, Politics, US History

Leave It Alone

1 Comment

Samhain                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Coming home tonight from the city I encountered a traffic slow down.  It allowed me to get close to an older model GM car with a bumper sticker in letters too small for me to read from a distance.  The bumper sticker read:  Leave the Constitution and the Bible Alone.

The world of such a person, that is a person who would both buy and display such a message, must have a lot of fear leaking into it.  Not surprising.  Job losses.  Uncertain economics at the national level.  A black President.  The furor stoked by the Tea Party folks.

Think of it though.  A whole world bounded by two written documents, documents written by men, interpreted by men and now some women, too, but documents of humans nonetheless.  A world with absolute faith in those two written documents, a faith so necessary, so critical that if others tamper with them…  Well.  They’d better not.  Leave’em Alone.  This feels like such a lonely and fettered existence, cramped, perhaps like a one room apartment or a small economy car.

Any conversation with such a person must not start with the constitution and the bible, it must start with the aspects of their life they believe protected by them.  Their sense of identity.  Security.  Safety.  Morality.  Only as people feel safe can they begin to question, until then, too much is at stake.

So, for God’s sake, leave them alone.

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Politics, US History

Teaching Pigs to Sing

Leave a comment

Samhain                                           Waning Thanksgiving Moon

“Trying to get people to reason in a way that is not natural for them is like trying to teach a pig to sing. You don’t accomplish anything and you annoy the pig.” – E. Jeffrey Conklin and William Weil

This seemed like a useful thought as we approach the opening of the 2011 legislative session.  We need to change our message so that those in charge of the legislator can hear it and realize that safeguarding our environmental heritage is a non-partisan responsibility to our kids, our grandkids and their grandkids.

More interviews today, more with talented people who want to work with the Sierra Club.

Little new snow today so I don’t anticipate the crush this morning that I experienced yesterday.  And more Big History on the drive.

Aging, Art and Culture, Politics, US History

Canadian Immigration circa 1968

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

If you haven’t read the satirical piece about Canadian immigration posted below, it’s worth a look.  I want to tell you here about a true story concerning Canadian immigration, but it comes from an earlier time.

One cold day in 1968 David McCain and I set out from Muncie, Indiana Toronto bound.  Being the 1960’s we were in a drafty Volkswagen Beetle, cranky in the cold and not much help on snow covered road.  Our destination was the Toronto Anti-Draft League which distributed pamphlets outlining how to achieve landed immigrancy status in Canada.  When sent through the mail, these pamphlets were routinely seized, so David and I decided to go after them ourselves.

We drove the distance from Muncie to Detroit in one go and headed for the Bluewater Bridge, the entry point at Sarnia, Ontario.  We both had long hair and, in our orange Beetle, no doubt looked like exactly what we were.  The Canadians turned us away.  Regroup.  We went into a shopping mall, bought white shirts and winter caps, put them on, stuffing our hair up under the caps and tried again in a different lane.  Success!

After some hours we made Toronto, found the Anti-Draft League and picked up the pamphlets.  While there we noticed a store selling Asian presents, so we bought some Hell Notes and some other cheap touristy kind of things.

We had a night in Toronto and somehow found our way to the a performance called Succession*, or Three Games of Chess.  This unusual event featured Marchel Duchamp and John Cage playing three games of chess on stage, the chess board wired for sound.  In addition one of those ducks that dips its beak in a water glass, then comes up, goes down and dips again, stood on a card table nearby similarly wired.  The other performer was a man sitting on a metal folding chair reading the the classified ads from that days New York Time.  Out loud.  Into a microphone.  The audience was free to come up on stage and watch these two giants of early twentieth century avante garde art.

We were among a small audience and we stayed well into the early morning, leaving before the three games ended.  It was only much later in life that I learned this was a signal moment in Cage’s career, an event for the ages.  I was just there accidentally.

Both Dave and I had developed colds on the way up and stopped in a Canadian pharmacy for cold medicine before we began our drive back to the States.

At the border we were stopped, marched into the station and given a strip search.  Free.  No charge.  When we put our clothes back on, we found items from the car on the counter in front of the customs office.  We had these items:  125 pamphlets on landed immigrancy in Canada, several items made in Red China (the gifts) and 2-2-2’s, the Canadian cold medicine which we did not know was 40% codeine.  No wonder we felt so confident crossing the border.  This all added up to a damning conclusion.

The Customs folks confiscated everything.

Fortunately, we had no drugs in the car.  The hood and engine compartments were open, with stuff strewn on the ground and the hubcaps were off.    The reasons for our trip were gone, never to come back.  Except our memories.

*Actually, Cage hadn’t lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art – or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, US History

A Tour Knocked Together

Leave a comment

Samhain                                       Waxing  Thanksgiving Moon

Finished initial work for my tour of the Thaw exhibition.  Some new information will come on Thursday during the Friends lecture focusing on Blackhawk and his ledger book, Elizabeth Hickox and her finely crafted miniature baskets and Maria Martinez, the renowned potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo.  I’ll meld that into the work I’ve just done.

I’m starting on Thursday in the Plains gallery with Judith Fogarty’s martingale and medicine bag for which she won the 1988 best of show at the Santa Fe Indian Art Festival, a prize of distinction in native american arts.  From there we’ll look at the honor shirts and Blackhawk’s ledger book, still in the Plains collection.  The Woodlands gallery, our home region, contains a wonderful bag, probably part of the kit of an Anishinabe shaman of the Midewiwin Society.  In the Arctic and Sub-Arctic I’ll take the group to the Yupik masks.  In the Northwest Coast region we’ll look at the frontlet of Raven-who-owns-the-sun and the bulging sided bent-wood bowl for serving fatty fish.  We’ll end up with a Maria Martinez pot and an Elizabeth Hickox basket.

This is a wonderful opportunity to see the very best of native art covering broad geographic regions.  A rare chance.  Hope you’ll be able to come.